


Love is Brightest in The Dark

by Island_Blue



Series: Love is Brightest in The Dark [1]
Category: Avatar: The Last Airbender
Genre: Abandonment, Bittersweet Ending, Communication, Death, F/M, Fire Lord Zuko, Friends to Lovers, Grief, Heartbreak, Motherhood, Other, Past Relationships, death ceremonies
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-08
Updated: 2019-08-08
Packaged: 2020-08-11 20:35:53
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,937
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20159713
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Island_Blue/pseuds/Island_Blue
Summary: Zutara, oneshot. A lifetime after the war, this is how their story finally gets laid to rest.





	Love is Brightest in The Dark

The morning Katara woke to cold hands, she knew her world had ended.

  
She was resting with her forehead pressed against her husband’s shoulder, her hand resting in his on his torso.

  
She could feel no warmth, no tension… No breath.

  
For a long time, she lay there with her eyes closed pretending that it was just another morning. She tried to hold on to the sensation of having him in her arms, but he felt smaller than he ever had, a shell deflated with the departure of the spirit that had so long sustained it.

  
She knew shock made people cold, but she also knew with certainty she would never be warm again.

  
Feeling ancient, Katara opened her eyes.

* * *

Katara was dry eyed at the funeral. She did not cry as the Fire Sages heralded her, gave grand speeches about her husbands reign and announced the children and grandchildren that he had left behind. She knew her children and the people around her were crying in earnest, but she was deafened to their cries.

  
Her stoicism remained as she watched her son set the blaze for her husbands’ pyre, felt the radiating heat from the flames though the warmth didn’t reach her bones.

  
She silently followed the Sages as they collected Zuko’s ashes and began the precession to the dragon bone catacombs, the sacred burial place for Fire Lord’s passed.

  
Her children fluttered around her anxiously, trying to help her walk, offering their assistance. Katara smiled at them but gently deflected.

  
She would hold her head high for this, she would honor her husband.

  
The procession took almost an hour to reach the dragon catacombs. Katara had always felt like an outsider here, even after over fifty years of marriage. This was a Fire Nation place, not hers. But Zuko had loved it here, had found it beautiful and awing.

  
She glanced around the ornate architecture and columns, watched the way the fading light from the setting sun played across the stones. She took a steadying breath. Zuko had loved coming here for picnics. Had thought this spot particularly romantic. And now this would be where his ashes would rest for eternity.

  
She stood in the catacombs for hours after the Sages had left. Her children had departed as well to wait for her above in the courtyard, wanting to give her privacy to say goodbye.

  
Katara stood there, staring at the stone statue of her husband. Her eyes flitted over the stone rendering that the mason had done with exceptional skill. He had gotten the firm set of his jaw just right, the sharp line of his brows and the curve of his lips. He was strong, dignified, regal. But the mason had carved the face of the Fire Lord, not of her husband.

  
The statue couldn’t capture the small pleased smile he had made whenever he made her laugh. It didn’t show the warm light in his eyes when he held his children. It stared silently back at her, the difference jarring. Her Zuko had been anything but silent with her all the long years of his life.

  
Katara left quietly, unable to say goodbye.

* * *

Katara left her mothers necklace on Izumi’s desk. Izumi may not want it, but perhaps young Iroh would give it to someone some day.

  
She left her fire lily hair comb on her bedside with a note _For Tala_ under it.

  
Katara neatly laid out her prized water bending scrolls on the bed, she knew Kya would appreciate those.

  
To Lu Ten she left her brothers space sword.

  
To Koda, Sokka’s boomerang.

  
To her beloved Rina, she left Zuko’s state of the art zeppelin.

  
For Paikea, who had loved her father more than anything, she left his lucky pai sho tile that he had carried with him since Iroh’s death.

  
She placed the rings that Zuko had given her upon the birth of each of their children on her dressing table, only to stare at them neatly lined up on the black marble. She put them back on her fingers. These were the one gift she would keep.

* * *

The guards said nothing to her as she left the palace. No one quite knew what to say to the widowed waterbender with the cold eyes since her husband’s death.

  
She didn’t mind. She didn’t know what to say to people either.

  
She refused the palanquin when she passed through the gate into Caldera. This wasn’t unusual. Short of her pregnancies, Katara had never used one all the years she had lived in the Fire Nation.

  
Her walk through the city was strange. It was evening, and she could hear the people living their lives, the sounds of family life filling the night alongside the crash of waves and the chirp of crickets.

  
She could hear children laughing, sounds of revelry, families sitting down to sup… a baby’s lone cry a long way off. Walking through the midst of all these lives Katara became acutely aware of how apart she felt from all of it. A month ago, she had been among the laughing, eating with her family, arguing with her daughters and rocking colicky babies to sleep. Now she just felt a chill deep in her bones that would not subside and the thought of the days ahead of her like stones in her heart.

  
The moon was high in the sky by the time she made it to the base of the volcano to her family’s favourite beach._ La’s Cove_, renamed so as a birthday present to her many years ago, was pristine and bleached silver in the moonlight.

  
Slipping off her shoes, Katara tread slowly over the sand. This was where she had fallen in love with Zuko. First a little, then all at once. This was where Tala had learned to surf, where Lu Ten had learned to walk. Where Koda had cried because he learned he could not bend at all. This was where Zuko had spent so many afternoons while Rina built sand cities and Paikea had played in the shallows collecting swan-crab shells.

  
Zuko’s holy place had always been the catacombs; he had found both solace and comfort among those towering stone columns, a sense of purpose and awe in something so solid that it had stood there for hundreds of years before him and would stand long after he was gone.

  
But for Katara, her holy place was here.

  
It was this place where she had found a home whilst living amongst dragons. It was where she had lived her life with her family, seen them grow and have children of their own. It was a place of immense joy and unfathomable heartbreak, and one that would also exist long after she was gone.

  
Katara bent and picked up a handful of sand, letting the grains slip past her wrinkled fingers. The white sand was so fine, it reminded her of ashes. Ash was the tradition of death in the fire nation.

  
But the southern water tribe had its own traditions.

  
Fuel was too rare a resource to burn. There was no soil to bury the dead in the poles, as they did in the earth kingdom. There was no way reach the mountain peaks the way the air nomads did for their sky burials.

  
But they had plenty of water.

  
Katara remembered the white pelt that her grandmother had wrapped her mothers body in. The painted stones that had been placed under the wrappings so that her mother would remain beneath the ocean.

  
But Katara was a master waterbender, she had no need for stones.

  
Shifting into a bending stance, Katara lifted her arms. She could feel the scream in her joints, but ignored it, choosing instead to focus on the eb and flow of the waves as she split an isle in the sea.

  
The ocean obeyed her command, the water fleeing her to gather in two towering walls, a passage appearing between them along the ocean floor.

  
Katara didn’t hesitate as she stepped forward. The old waterbender walked along the sea floor, her procession slow as she maneuvered around boulders and coral. She walked until the walls of water on either side grew so tall they blocked out the sky, all except for the full moon which rippled white and silver above her.

  
Stopping, Katara watched her element in wonderment, her hand reaching out to brush the wall on her left as fish swam about her. Her element had always been so beautiful to her. She was glad the last thing she would see would be something beautiful.

  
In the weeks since his death, Katara had been strong. Strong for herself and the family that needed her not to fall apart. But here beneath the ocean, with only the moon for company, Katara let the loneliness she had been holding at bay wash over her.

  
“Oh, Zuko...” she whispered, the waves drowning out her hitching breath, her frail shoulders shaking as she pressed her hand hard against her mouth in an effort to muffle the awful sound escaping her chest.

  
He had been larger than life to her… And it would seem, that she could no longer see a life past the end of his.

  
Katara had lived a full life, but she had never felt old until she had laid her husband to rest. In a world where she had lived to see the death of her parents, grandmother, brother, friends… Zuko had been her anchor. The one to make time stand still. With him, she had never felt old. How could she, when she could only ever see a young man behind her husband’s kind yellow eyes? But now he was gone, and she was adrift.

  
She thought of her children and grandchildren who would be grieved at her passing. She knew they would be heartbroken, but that was the way of life. People lived, and then they died, there was no shame in that. They would be alright. They had lives of their own, and her life had run its course.

  
She thought back to a long-forgotten evening wrapped up in Zuko’s arms. She had been dozing only to wake up and catch him staring at her.

  
_“What?” she had asked._

  
_ His pale gold eyes had glowed in the dark. “You were a star on a dark horizon for me, I followed you and you led me home.”_

  
_ Katara had wrinkled her nose at him. “Cheesy,” she had reprimanded._

  
_ His eyes were soft as he watched her, no longer self conscious of her teasing. “If the last words I say to you aren’t ‘I love you,’ know that they were the ones on my mind.”_

  
Entirely too touched, and not at all ready to think of a world without him in it she had reached for him desperately. She hadn’t wanted to think of him gone, or what her last words for him would be.

  
Now, she knew.

  
“You were my home,” she whispered to the night air.

  
She let go of the water.

  
The towers that she had made of the ocean crashed around her, burying her beneath their waves in darkness.

  
A memory flashed in her mind, of her as a small child standing on a block of ice with her grandmother. She had been asking about her mother… The first person she had ever seen to be taken back by the sea.

  
_“Water is life, my sweet girl. In life it sustains us…and in death, we return, to the ocean that welcomes us all,”_ her gran-gran’s voice had whispered.

  
Katara closed her eyes.

**Author's Note:**

> Ok, so that was depressing. Sorry if you guys didn’t expect that! This is the end of my little non-canon universe, which I wrote backwards. Technically this is the epilogue, now I just need to write the rest.
> 
> I played around with Zuko being the one left behind and I just couldn’t see it. I modeled Katara’s death after the death scene of Basila from ‘Palm Trees in the Snow’ (if you want a good cry and like foreign films, it’s a must watch). And that little line of Zuko’s last words was inspired from a quote from Jaime in Outlander (the books!). I want it clear that I didn’t actually want Katara’s death to feel like suicide, because that is definitely not how I saw it. I saw it more like her taking control of natures natural progression and deciding that her time was over. 
> 
> I also really wanted this story to maintain the theme that Katara remained Water Tribe even if she married Zuko. No matter if she lived in the Fire Nation, was the Fire Lord’s wife, and birthed a new generation of Firebenders. I wanted her and Zuko to accomplish being together while still remaining themselves. I notice that in a lot of fics, Katara gets amalgamated a lot into Fire Nation, and I really wanted the blending to be focused on their children. I wanted their kids to be the ones to struggle with identifying with one, both or no nation, very much like the whole Lu Dao conflict from the comics (this is going to be in a separate piece, but part of this work). 
> 
> I also thought her and Zuko’s death traditions was a unique way of having my favorite two characters put to rest in the ways of their people that still, somehow, kept them together, even while culturally they were still apart.  
This fic was a way of me exploring what I thought could have been the best parts of Zutara, and like my favourite parts of these characters, was bittersweet.


End file.
